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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoPete Souza | Chicago Tribune??Coal-mining operations in West Virginia blast off mountaintops to uncover valuable, low-sulfur coal seams. Leftover rock and dirt often ends up in nearby valleys and streams.

WASHINGTON — In West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, fish are vanishing. The number of species
has fallen, the populations of those that remain are down, and some fish look a little skinny.

A new government study traces the decline in abundance to mountaintop removal, the controversial
coal-mining practice of clear-cutting trees from mountains before blowing off their tops with
explosives.

When the resulting rain of shattered rock hits the rivers and streams that snake along the base
of the mountains, minerals released from within the stone change the water’s chemistry, the study
said, lowering its quality and causing tiny prey such as insects, worms and invertebrates to
die.

“We’re seeing significant reductions in the number of fish species and total abundance of fish
downstream from mining operations,” said Nathaniel Hitt, a research fish biologist for the U.S.
Geological Survey’s office in Kearneysville, W.Va., and one of the study’s two authors.

Hitt and his co-author, Doug Chambers, a biologist and water-quality specialist in the
Charleston, W.Va., office of the USGS, took a 1999 study of the Guyandotte River basin’s fish
populations by Penn State researchers to compare them over time.

For two years starting in 2010, they sampled the populations in waters downstream from an active
mountaintop coal-mining operation. In one of the sample areas, the Mud River watershed, which
contains the largest tributary of the Guyandotte River, at least “100 point-source
pollution-discharge permits associated with surface mining have been issued,” the study said.

North America’s central Appalachian Mountains, where the basin lies, are considered a global hot
spot of freshwater-fish biodiversity, but few researchers have investigated the impact of mountain
strip mining on stream fish, and the effects “are poorly understood,” the study said.

Hitt and Chambers found that the number of species was cut in half and the abundance of fish
fell by a third. The silverjaw minnow, rosyface shiner, silver shiner, bluntnose minnow, spotted
bass and largemouth bass, plus at least two other species detected before their study, were no
longer there.

Another fish species — the small and wormlike least brook lamprey, never before detected — had
moved in.

In areas of the river basin where there was no mountaintop mining, fish flourished. In addition
to species that had been in those waters previously, seven new ones were found, including the
spotfin shiner, the spottail shiner and the golden redhorse.

“I think if we only focus on the fact that it’s fish ... some people will say, ‘So what?’ ”
Chambers said. But fish and the invertebrates they eat are canaries in a coal mine for researchers,
“indicators of the water quality,” he said.

The USGS looks “at the nation’s water resources ... their significance to the nation, and tries
to understand processes that are degrading water quality. Tainted water may not be suitable for
additional uses.”

Research such as the USGS’ study of mountaintop mining, published online this month by the
Society for Freshwater Science, is viewed with suspicion in coal country, where mining operations
provide thousands of jobs.

“The people opposed to the coal industry are trying to pile on with more studies,” said Bill
Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “It sounds like this is one of those
studies that sets out to show there’s harm done. It sounds like perhaps more of the same.”

Raney said he has not seen the USGS study and cannot strongly criticize its methods or
conclusions, but people “don’t just wake up in the morning and decide they are going to do
mountaintop mining,” he said. “It takes three to four years to get a permit. Every aspect of the
operation is analyzed.”

Mountaintop removal as a way of extracting coal has been in practice since the 1960s, but its
use has expanded in the past two decades, and it now takes place in the Appalachian regions of
Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia in addition to West Virginia.

The coal that the process produces provides power to hundreds of thousands of homes, industry
advocates say, and creates about 14,000 jobs that pay middle-income salaries in regions where work
is hard to find.

“The average mining wage is more than $66,000 per year ... 57 percent higher than the average
for industrial jobs,” according to the National Mining Association. “Mountaintop mining accounts
for approximately 45 percent of the entire state’s coal production in West Virginia.”

Raney’s association disputes allegations that mining destroys streams and mountains, saying that
state permits and government regulations require the land to be restored after use.

But the Sierra Club Eastern Missouri Group called the practice “quite possibly the worst
environmental assault yet” because of the amount of landscape it removes and the effects on people
and animals.

Homeowners in one West Virginia community, Lindytown, were bought out by a company before the
town essentially disappeared after mountaintop removal. Homes and a grave site were left behind.
Cascading debris has buried streams, affecting a diversity of wildlife, a major concern raised by
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Often, companies are granted exemptions that ease requirements to restore land. Conservationists
call the practice a plunder, and protesters, including Quakers in Appalachia and demonstrators at
the White House, have called on the government to end it and banks to stop funding it.

“Mountaintop-removal mining is one of the fastest-changing land-use forms in the region,” Hitt
said. “One of the main questions for our research lab is how biological communities respond to
land-use changes.”

In the case of the fish, they seemingly do not respond well, Chambers said. “To sum up, 10 fish
species were apparently extirpated from the mined sites,” meaning they were wiped out, he said.

Fish with a more diverse diet appeared to fare well, but those that relied primarily on
invertebrates, such as small aquatic insects, tended to fare poorly.

“It’s telling us that the water quality is changing,” Chambers said. Water in that area is not
used for drinking, he said, but “if you look at it from a regulatory perspective, you have to
determine if the water is fishable, swimmable, drinkable — all of these are benchmarks.”